This is very much a PTR experiment, but we are going to try moving Blazing Speed to the top talent tier to replace Scorch. Scorch will become a baseline Fire spell. Blazing Speed’s old position on the talent tree will be replaced with a new talent.

The new talent is currently called Flameglow, and it is a “permanently on” ability that reduces all damage taken by a flat amount, based on spellpower, up to a maximum of 30% of the hit. The intent is to give mages a passive defensive option, and also one that varies with the frequency of incoming damage. Remember, mages must give up Temporal Shield or Ice Barrier to take the new talent.

We agree with the feedback that Blazing Speed makes more sense grouped with the movement talents than with the defensive talents. In addition, we have buffed Ice Floes already from live, and we have added an additional perk that spells cast within the first half a second of Ice Flows don’t consume a charge. Currently if you’re making use of spell queuing, it’s easy to waste the first charge, so this fix is intended to help with that.

That brings us to Scorch. Sorch feels really valuable to many players (above and beyond Arcane using it rotationally to avoid dropping stacks), but we’re concerned that it feels more valuable than it actually is. Yes, Elemental and Hunters can do a lot of damage while on the move, but not every spec in the game needs to do so, and mages have a lot of other advantages. Mages do have several tools to deal with movement, such as several instants and abilities such as Blink and the tier 2 talents to minimize movement time. We’d rather seem mages plan, move quickly, and plant rather than just stay moving all the time. Scorch preempts all of those tools and has the added psychological benefit of feeling like you’re always doing something, and because of that feeling of being productive, we’re concerned you have less motivation to minimize movement. Mathematically, if you’re making full use of your available tools without Scorch, Scorch isn’t much of a benefit of all, and we think the mage class would feel and play better overall without Scorch as a crutch. We debated removing Scorch completely, and we still might, but we’re sensitive to the fact that so many mages are using Scorch today and might not understand or appreciate its loss. As a compromise, we’re going to try Scorch as Fire only to preserve the gameplay for players who really like it and to help differentiate the Mage specs a bit more.

This is a big change, and the kind of thing we might revert if we and you don’t like how it plays. Try it out and let us know.

/discuss

Personally defensive talent like this is a warm welcome and moving Blazing Speed out of tier2 talents to tier1 sounds nice. Also with PoM->RoF nerf Blazing Speed starts to look really nice option.

mages will have a lot of passive reduction towards physical damage with molten armor and this new flameglow talent which I don't believe is necessarily a good thing for the game.

I like the change because I feel that with purge, mages need a nondispellable defensive option. If it is implemented carefully I think it could work. It will probably cause scaling problems with resilience and better gear in later seasons. It also adds the interesting potential for spellpower abilities and trinkets to be defensive but it probably won't amount to much.

On another note, scorch baseline for fire is wonderful and moving blazing speed is excellent as well.

If it is implemented carefully I think it could work. It will probably cause scaling problems with resilience and better gear in later seasons.

This is my concern as well. I think with every season if the devs made a pass at flameglow to make sure things were scaling correctly it would be a completely fine ability. It should be a goal to reach close to ~25-30% with BiS gear each season, not to reach 30% this season and have that for the rest of the xpac.

I also think that SP/Intel trinkets (on-use only) should allow you to go beyond the 30% cap temporarily. It would add an interesting element & a little higher skill cap to the class.

inb4 fire mages camping on 2k-2.4 and only the good ones win and the bad ones just go for draw cus they cant kill or setup a kill, like s11 fighting frost healer just pillar kitting with 50½ hp cus they were aoe'd cus theyr are retarded enough to stack up all the time

It will likely use numbers similar to your example though. Which would mean any hit under 30k will be reduced by 30% (auto attacks, most non crits, DoTs etc.). Even if you hit 50k it's a 20% reduction. And honestly, a 10% reduction would be welcome for many classes, and you would have to be hit for over 100k for that to not be the case.

It will likely use numbers similar to your example though. Which would mean any hit under 30k will be reduced by 30% (auto attacks, most non crits, DoTs etc.). Even if you hit 50k it's a 20% reduction. And honestly, a 10% reduction would be welcome for many classes, and you would have to be hit for over 100k for that to not be the case.

DoT classes will have a great time with this and Mage Armor.

It has the potential to be really strong.. But that all depends on the numbers(which we will probably see tomorrow with a new ptr build). I don't think it will be as high as my example(or I hope not). As I would hope that blizzard has learned their lesson with defensive stance.

And how is absorbing multiple 4000s in a row bad in a game where your death log contains 30 attacks that killed you? If anything 30% may be too powerful.

If 5.2 doesn't change the gamestyle from 2-3 globals killing you(Powershot + Warrior's Swifty), I will prefer Ice Barrier for that job.
If it does change it into shadowcleave/lsd2 kinda dot-style game, then it's overpowered.

My initial thoughts were that you could drop down big hits down with this if the spell was to have say 100% spell power efficiency. Like 100k->80k and from small hits like 10k->7k, 1k->700 and so on. Now it's useless against big hits basically.